Après le feu

A gentle and patient travelling camera accompanies sunrise on the Père Lachaise cemetery, and by continual metamorphosis of the visual material shows a break through crossed by a chromatic life inexhaustible variations. A film born from Léos Carax's Holy Motors, with whom I collaborated on a music of Jean-Benoît Dunckel.

TGV Paris-Bordeaux, tuesday january 6th 2009 : dawn... And airs grown calm when white the dawn appeareth And white snow falling where no wind is bent . . . Guido Cavalcanti (1255, 1300) Film (numérique) de 6', HD 720p, juin 2009 rom black to brown and then white, red and yellow, the light of this snowy dawn was astonishing. I had this phrase from Guido Cavalcanti in my head. I wanted to put it into colors. I wanted to film a landscape in movement, a landscape unfolding, a landscape that would go to our hearts through the play of fragile materialety and of pictural poetry.

"Mountains are falling, and there's nothing we can do about it. And even if we have the means to rise to their height to admire them, to surpass those inaccessible peaks where many explorers lost their lives trying to gain the privilege of overcoming them, the mountains will continue to fall as they continue to rise. If Mount Blanc falls, it also rises."

In Le Livre d’Image, Jean-Luc Godard recycles existing images (films, documentaries, paintings, television archives, etc.), quotes excerpts from books, uses fragments of music. The driving force is poetic rhyme, the association or opposition of ideas, the aesthetic spark through editing, the keystone. The author performs the work of a sculptor. The hand, for this, is essential. He praises it at the start. “There are the five fingers. The five senses. The five parts of the world (…). The true condition of man is to think with his hands. Jean-Luc Godard composes a dazzling syncopation of sequences, the surge of which evokes the violence of the flows of our contemporary screens, taken to a level of incandescence rarely achieved. Crowned at Cannes, the last Godard is a shock film, with twilight beauty.

Ways and forms of signal freedom.

A solo audiovisual performance. Eighth entry into deeply beguiling series of works responding to the Alps acted as the closing night event of Alchemy Film Festival. The images are studies of the Alps degraded and distorted live at the front of the auditorium; the picture pixelated, streams of colour engulfed the screen like a crashed desktop, and as hawks hovered over the mountains they left staggered trails of glitches across the screen like computerised vapour trails. The audio was also created live using short atonal precomposed tracks. The aim was to create a digital alchemy, an abstracted journey into the mountains, a wild wonder inside and out.

Salammbô is an alchemical game between my images, Othman Louati's music vibrating in Noé Nillni's trumpet and Gustave Flaubert's text carried by Julien Ribeill's voice.

With the immense freighters, the colors of the horizon will come, pushed by the winds, to take the whites of the cliffs, to project them in the green of the vegetation...

For Jean-Luc Godard, with all the admiration and affection of Jacques Perconte and Nicole Brenez. December 3, 2020.

Musician Jean-Benoît Dunckel, one half of the band AIR, and filmmaker Jacques Perconte, who works with Jeff Mills, an artist known for his colors and landscapes, who sculpts with his digital palette. Together, they created especially for the opening of the festival, a dialogue between improvisation and high-speed chase. Normandy's wooded countryside, magnified for the occasion, turns into a thousand suns rise and dazzle us.

Angstel is a film-performance. The character was born one boring afternoon. He embodied the energy we had to spare, as much as he embodied our inability to take action. A manifesto of the limits to be overcome, Angstel was constructed through a series of disorganized performances in public spaces, culminating in a written and staged performance (which was ultimately lost).

The infinity of an extraordinary landscape, a canoe trip down the Ardèche gorges. The image is lodged in a stone vault in a sacred place.

This second repetition engages time even more, it is a hundred and eight times that we see these few two minutes already slowed down. With each new repetition, the colors slide and feed. The color reflects the inner journey.

The island of Patiras is the first land on the water of the estuary of the Gironde (west south of France). It is the first place where the winds of the ocean sink. It is a modest land with no relief. At the point, there is a shelter, an observatory overhung by a lighthouse. It is a rough and delicate corner, where time is suspended, but swept by the wind, burned by the sun, blown by the salts of the spray.